Inspection 12 ready for your inspection

It was one of those transitional days, where the clouds have rolled in and the temperature had warmed to a comfortable level, but within hours it was back to winter again.

Dan McLintock, the lead singer for Inspection 12, sat at a table at a Riverside pizza place, waiting for Pete Mosley, the other half of the band's core.

Singer Dan McLintock (left) and guitarist Pete Mosely, members of the Jacksonville band Inspection 12, recently released Get Rad. They'll perform tonight at Jack Rabbits in San Marco. BRUCE LIPSKY/The Times-Union

McLintock does a funny thing when he's got nothing to do or when he's nervous. He wipes the table with a napkin almost furiously, then straightens it out and looks up. He wiped the menu the same way, and throughout the afternoon, in sporadic flares, he picked up his glass of water, and wiped down the area around it.

Inspection 12 also has a show on Sunday, Dec. 28 at Freebird Cafe. Tickets: $10.

Information: (904) 246-2473.

Pete, without thought, replied, "How you doing? I'm Pete," and shook his hand.

Mosely and McLintock have been in Inspection 12 since their high school years, so their banter is so on that at times it feels like a Penn & Teller skit.

The band has just finished releasing Get Rad, an album for which they lost their record deal with Honest Don, a respectable punk label, and which they had to buy back and self-release.

"When we first got the news, our jaws dropped," said McLintock. The label dropped them after the band had spent eight months recording the album.

"The first words out of [the label president's] mouth were, 'My label doesn't put out this kind of music. And I don't even know what to call it.' "

"And we were like, 'OK you're an indie label: That's what you're supposed to do,' " said Mosely.

Get Rad seems to be the album that really defies Inspection 12's previous incarnations. It retains its punk roots while venturing into Ben Folds piano territory in Feeling Like Freddie, and even tries its hand at some hybrid bluegrass with The Naked At School Dream. It's a mature album, that coming from a couple of 23-year-olds, shows much more potential than their earlier releases.

This is the first album the band recorded without drummer Scott Shad, who died at age 20 after he went into diabetic shock while driving.

"Immediately after it happened, we had people asking us, 'So what are you gonna do?' We were like, 'We haven't really thought about it.' We had other things on our mind, like losing him. It took us about a month or so to kind of actually want to sit around and talk about it.

"We didn't want to think about it at the time," interrupted McLintock. "He was like . . ."

"He was more of a friend than a band member," said Mosely. "We finally decided to [add] Tim [Grisnik, their current drummer] only because he was like someone who was close to us. He knew Scott real well. They went to school together; they were friends. It was definitely like, 'We're not gonna get some guy to come in and play -- audition some person we don't know.' "

Inspection 12 has probably been one of Jacksonville's most consistent bands. It was around when Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit were still getting started (Mosely claims to have flyers with Bizkit spelled Bisquit) and at times the band has been incredibly popular.

With this new album, they're facing some backlash. In the punk community, using a piano is sacrilege.

"I take criticism better than I used to before," said McLintock. "I was ready. I prepared myself for the criticism, because I knew that [Get Rad] was different."

"Do you care?" I asked.

"No. I don't . . . Not anymore," he said.

Most bands are out to be rock stars. McLintock and Mosely said they've scrapped the notion.

"We're not concerned about selling records and making money off of it," said Mosely. "Like, sure we want to pay ourselves back and maybe have some money so maybe we can do it again. But we're not at all concerned with the . . ."

"Business of it," interrupted McLintock. "At least not anymore. I think I used to not really want it, but said we can do the business of it."

They do that without thought. It's almost like a twin thing. At times, their sentences overlap, and they say the same thing. They let each other tell the other's stories, and they both enjoy pizza with Ranch dressing -- a habit Mosely picked up from Ryan Key, Yellowcard's lead man.

"Everybody said that it'd be great if we could support ourselves playing music," continued Mosely. "And then we just toned it down and it's more of just a hobby for us. We don't want to turn it into a job. We don't want any kind of obligation to make money. We want just the obligation of making music."